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“@wilw @dduane fan project for #Kimvention2012 – What do you think the 6 Tasks of Snowman Hank were? #kimpossible #snowmanhank”

…All I can say is… it got me thinking. Too many people know that I love the Kim Possible series dearly, for a number of reasons including the relative smoothness with which the characters grow and change. And then the tweet reminded me of the Christmas episode, which is… quirky. (And which I particularly love for its self- and extra-referential qualities.)

So I sat down for several days and did some development thinking, and then wrote. (For those who’re interested in seeing some notes on how a writer goes about making a nonexistent Christmas special out of a minute and a half of video and a few lines of dialogue, they’re here.) And below you’ll now find what an animation writer in a hurry (and possibly also a few drinks gone in pre-Christmas cheer) might have turned in to a tolerant story editor at some 80’s network as the first-draft outline for “The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank.” (I more or less imagine the story editor as being Art Nadel, that prince among producers, who gave many a new animation writer his or her leg-up into the industry in the Eighties.)

I don’t often get to do the disclaimer thing, so here it is:

The Snowman Hank character originated in an episode of the Walt Disney Television Animation series Kim Possible, and therefore is the property of Disney. (But you knew that.)

This is a work of fan fiction and is copyright to Disney Enterprises Inc. if to anyone.

Everybody clear on that?

Good. Then let’s roll. …One other thing: there are songs in this. Songwriting isn’t in my skillset, so I’ve merely indicated what the songs should be like, or do to the listener. Use your imaginations.

THE SIX TASKS OF SNOWMAN HANK

ACT ONE

We open on a snowy Rockies landscape over which towers the imposing and magical BLIZZARD MOUNTAIN. Running down the mountain slopes, Snowline Canyon ends in a sheltered spot called HANK’S CORRAL.

Here we meet SNOWMAN HANK, who for most of the year lives a somewhat solitary and sedate (if musical) life as protector of the local forest and mountain creatures. But he’s not right in the middle of his favorite time of year, and his busiest. It’s Christmas Eve, and tonight it’ll be Hank’s job to round up the magical walking fir trees of Blizzard Mountain in his corral, and then head them down to Snowline Junction — the last stop on the steam train line that runs down to Summertown at the foot of the mountain. It’s from Blizzard Mountain that all the people for miles around get their Christmas trees, and Hank knows that they depend on him to make a really important part of Christmas happen.

It’s almost time for the big Walking Tree Roundup, and Hank is practicing [THE TREE ROUNDUP SONG] one last time before it’s time to start the real thing going. But he’s interrupted in his practice by a huge ruckus outside the Corral. Within seconds a COYOTE comes tearing into the Corral in hot pursuit of a SNOWSHOE HARE. Though these two are both friends of Hank’s, they’re natural enemies, and they never miss a chance to make each other’s life miserable if they can.

Hank breaks them up in a way that suggests he’s an old hand at this. The hare, JOSH, and the coyote, LUCIUS, immediately start squabbling over who’s going to deliver the important news they’re carrying to Hank, and he has to break them up all over again. Finally the news comes out that the rustic road that runs up and down the mountainside – the one the Walking Trees use on their way down to the train depot — has been blocked by a landslide.

“So let’s go clear the way,” Hank says. Slinging his trusty guitar CHANTEUSE over his shoulder – because Hank would never go anywhere without her – he heads up the mountain along with Lucius and Josh (who keep fighting all the way). This time it takes [A ROLLICKING SONG ABOUT NOT BEATING UP ON THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM MUCH: TITLE GOES HERE] to break up their squabbling and get them on track to be of some kind of use to deal with the blocked road when they reach the trouble spot. (The trees, already eager to get going, can be seen bopping in time to the music in the background as the three friends move along. The implication is that Hank’s music is itself magical and one of the things that helps the trees move.)

Shortly they get to the place where the road is blocked by a huge heap of stones and rubble. Josh and Lucius start vying with each other in trying to get rid of the rocks, but they’re too small to do much but produce a lot of inadvertent physical comedy, and they make no real difference at all. Finally Hank uses his guitar again to play a MAGIC DANCE TUNE so bouncy and irresistible that the piled-up stones just boogie off to either side of the road and then roll down off the side of the mountain.

Josh and Lucius cheer, and Hank, pleased, reckons that he can go back home now and start getting ready for the Walking Tree Roundup. But just as he’s turning to make his way back, from further up the road someone slowly appears who none of them were expecting to see. It’s a tortoise called TERRY.

Terry’s another old friend of Hank’s, very old (though he looks fairly young) and very wise. Normally he wouldn’t be out and around at this time of year, but now he looks around with the air of someone who’s half expected what he sees. “Yup, this is about when it was supposed to happen,” Terry says.

“When what was supposed to happen?” says Josh.

“The tasks,” Terry says. “Years ‘n’ years ago, the Medicine Woman of the Blizzard Mountain Tribe told me how it’d happen. There’d be a time when the rocks start rolling, and the rivers wouldn’t flow, and the trees wouldn’t walk — and a winter would come that there wouldn’t be a spring after. Then someone’d have to do six tasks to put it all right. Looks like this was one of those tasks…”

“But there’s nothing wrong with the trees!”

“You sure about that?”

Worried, Hank starts playing Chanteuse and singing the TREE ROUNDUP SONG – even though it’s not time for it yet – and though the trees try to get up out of the ground and follow him, they aren’t able to. He’s horrified. “They can’t walk! And if they can’t walk there won’t be any Christmas trees for the kids down in Summertown!”

“So there you go,” Terry says. “Better get started on fixing this up before Christmas comes…”

Hank isn’t wild about the idea that he’s the one meant to do these mysterious tasks, but he agrees – however reluctantly – that he has to at least find out why the trees can’t walk, and solve the problem somehow. “Won’t be easy,” Terry says. “You’ve got to find what’s been lost and give up what you’ve found… make a friend, make an enemy, underneath the ground. When the rocks start rolling and the rivers won’t flow, then what can’t move will show you the way you have to go.”

All this is obscure and troubling, but Hank’s not the type to shirk a job that needs doing. “Better get on with it, then,” he mutters, and starts heading up the mountain along the newly cleared road. “But how come you never told me about this before?”

“Wasn’t the time, and anyway, you never asked,” Terry says as he slowly follows Hank and the others. “Don’t wait up for me, son, you just get going, you’ve got five more tasks to do…”

“What kind of friend are you gonna make under the ground?” Josh wonders. “Or what kind of enemy?” says Lucius. They start squabbling over which of the two clues is more important, and Hank has to separate them again. “One thing at a time, boys,” he says. “I’m more worried about the idea that some river might stop flowing. There’s only one river on Blizzard Mountain, and a lot of critters depend on it. Better go check it out…”

They make their way further up the mountain and are met by a PRAIRIE DOG named PAULA. “Snowman Hank!” she says, “thank goodness you’ve come! It’s the river!”

“Lead the way,” Hank says. Following Paula, they make their way to the nearby riverbank – and find the river frozen solid!

“How can this be happening?” Josh cries. “This is plumb freaky!” says Lucius.

Hank’s inclined to agree. But for the moment he unslings Chanteuse and starts to play and sing [A JOLLY BREAKING-THE-ICE SONG]. As he does, the ice starts to shatter and is gradually carried away down the watercourse. “Thanks, Hank!” Paula says. “We knew you could help!”

“Not sure I have, though,” Hank says, reslinging Chanteuse. “That river’s never frozen before, not even in the Big Snow of ’33. Whatever’s going on, it needs more looking into. Come on.” And he starts uphill.

“But where are we going?” Paula says, falling in with the others.

“You got trouble with a river, go to the source,” Hank says.

“You mean – the Haunted Caves of Blizzard Mountain?”

Everybody freaks a little at the very idea. But Hank just keeps going with a look of increasingly grim determination, and the others follow him…

Soon they’re entering an area where the trees are very high and thick and close together. “Shadowpine Forest,” Hank says. “These are the oldest trees on Blizzard Mountain.” And he sounds a little uneasy, which doesn’t help the others’ composure. “Don’t normally bother them this time of year. They’re full of old tree thoughts, they deserve their peace…” But it’s while making their way through this spooky area that they start hearing strange high voices calling.

“Ghosts!” Josh shrieks, and “Ice goblins!” Lucius yells, and both of them dive for cover (in pointedly opposite directions).

But the sound has nothing to do with goblins or ghosts. Hiding from them under the huge trees – because they’re as unnerved by Hank and his friends as Hank’s companions are by the voices – they shortly discover two CHILDREN, a brother and sister named BOB and BABS. “What’re you young un’s doing all the way up here all by yourself in this weather?” Hank says, for the snowclouds are moving in.

“We were looking for a Christmas tree,” Bob says, apparently recovering instantaneously from being encountering a talking snowman with a guitar.

“Our family doesn’t have a lot of money this Christmas,” says Babs. “Our folks said we might not be able to have a tree this year. So we thought…”

“You thought you’d come up and try to find one for yourselves,” Hank says softly.

“And then we got lost,” Bob says. “And we couldn’t find our way down again,” says Babs. “And we’re cold… and we just want to go home!” they plead in unison.

“Your folks’ll be going plumb loco looking for you,” Hank says. “We need to get you back to your family!” And he looks like he’d rather do nothing else. But all the same, he looks up the mountain. “Might not be safe for you right now, though,” he says. And as he speaks, the first flakes of snow start falling. It’s getting dark…

“We’ll take them down the mountain, Hank,” says Lucius. “I’ll help him,” says Josh.

Lucius starts bristling. “I don’t need your help, you varmint – ”

But Hank shakes his head. “Better if we all stick together,” Hank says. “Safety in numbers.” He tries to sound cheerful and confident, but the look on his face as he leads the group out of the Darkpine Forest and onward up the mountain suggests that he’s not sure how safe they’re all going to be. He starts playing and singing [A CHEERFUL WE’RE-ON-AN-ADVENTURE SONG] as they head up the mountain, and the kids and animals chime in. But Hank is worried…

The snow is falling faster now, and it’s almost night as the group reaches the place where Hot Spring River comes out of the mountainside. The river’s banks are almost completely covered with ice and the river’s stream is narrowed to a mere trickle: almost as they watch, it freezes over again.

“Thought this might happen,” Hank says. “I’ve got to go in and find out what’s going on. ‘What doesn’t move will show you the way…’” To the children he says, “Hate to say it, but I think you’d best come with: we still ought to stay together.”

“We’re not afraid,” Babs says. “Much,” Bob says.

“That’s the spirit,” Hank says. “Just keep your eyes open. We’ll sort out whatever’s wrong in there and get you back down to Summertown and your family by Christmas.”

The kids produce flashlights they’ve wisely brought with them. Everyone’s a little nervous, but Hank’s unwavering certainty that good will prevail becomes the solid center around which all of them coalesce, like the single grain of ice at the heart of a snowflake. All together, they move into the cave and vanish in the darkness…

ACT THREE:

The group makes its way deeper and deeper into the cave, weaving their way among stalagmites like stone Christmas trees and stalactites like huge stone icicles. Though they’re creepy, the caverns are also glitteringly beautiful, and even Lucius and Josh, who’ve been paranoid about ghosts, are beginning to relax a little.

At one point, however, the kids become too cold to go on, and the party pauses for a rest and to try to warm them up. There’s no point in trying to cuddle up to a snowman, and Hank knows he can’t be of any use to Babs and Bob that way: but all the other critters crowd in close, and shortly Bob and Babs are wearing a coat of live snowshoe rabbit, coyote and prairie dog fur. Hank unlimbers Chanteuse and sings [A HEARTRENDINGLY SEASONAL SONG ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY: SOMEBODY GET SONDHEIM IN HERE, PLEASE, OR ELSE RAISE JOHNNY MARKS OR IRVING BERLIN FROM THE DEAD]. And as he sings the part about looking for a family until you find one, the critters exchange sad glances.

The kids, rested and warmed up, now jump up and are ready to carry on. Josh, though, and Lucius, have a quiet word with the snowman. “Hank… you know you have a family. You have us.”

“I know I do.” But it sounds like Hank’s not terribly sure. He gets up. “Come on, folks. We should get moving. The sooner we’ve found out what’s going on here, the sooner we can get you kids back down to your nice warm house in Summertown…”

They start moving again through the cavern and are surprised when ahead of them they hear a voice calling for help. Hank immediately follows it: the others rush headlong past him, and alarmed, Hank hurries to stop them. Which is a good thing, because in the darkness they nearly fall into a bottomless crevasse! They just manage to stop in time — though Josh and Lucius pitch over the edge together. The crisis of the moment forces them to bypass their normal sniping and help each other up and out.

Carefully the group makes its way around the edges of the crevasse to the other side. Far down the passage they can see a faint light, and between them and the light there’s the silhouette of a skinny wavering shape. To their surprise, they find it’s a snake (in a Stetson) named BOOMSLANG BILL. As they get close to him, Bart coils up and rattles and threatens them. “You consarned little varmint!” Lucius says, but he’s not willing to get too close. Neither is Josh. Paula, though, seriously annoyed at what just nearly happened to the other two, simply flings herself at Bill and sits down on him just behind the head.

He thrashes around, but can’t make any headway: Paula is substantial. “You can torture me, but I won’t talk!” he shouts.

But Hank steps in. “No need to be mean to him just because we got off on the wrong foot,” he says. “So to speak. Pardner, what’d you mean by acting like you were in trouble? You nearly made us fall right down that almighty hole!”

“I was following my master’s orders! He told me to do it.”

“Your master, huh,” Hank says, grabbing the snake out from under Paula. “And just where might he be?”

The snake indicates the faint light down at the end of the tunnel, and starts shivering. “Down there…”

“That’s where it’s coldest, all right,” Josh says. All of them are feeling colder now.

“Well, I reckon he’s the one we’ve come to see,” Hank says, “so you’d better just bring us to him. You have any problems with that?”

“Yes!” Bill shouts. “Uh, actually, no,” he adds a lot more quietly.

“Good,” Hank says. “You do right by us, son, we’ll do right by you. Lead the way.”

The group heads toward the faint chilly light in the distance. Boomslang Bill is plainly confused by the treatment he’s receiving. “How come you aren’t…you know…”

“My mom said I had to,” Bill says after a moment. “She said this job would be perfect for me. Because I was so cold-blooded…” And suddenly he bursts into sobs. “I never asked to be cold-blooded!”

The critters exchange skeptical looks. “Sounds like an occupational hazard for a snake,” Josh mutters.

“That’s just the problem! I didn’t want to be venomous! But there are all these expectations – “ Bill continues to vent, while the other critters, somewhat bemused, take turns listening to him.

At the end of the tunnel they soon find a huge cavern, definitely haunted… but not in the usual way. At the center of it is a DARK, MANLIKE SHAPE on an icy throne. In the entrance to the cavern, everyone freezes at the sight.

Then Hank unslings Chanteuse and very slowly moves toward the throne. It’s a gunslinger moment: snowmen don’t wear spurs, but you can almost hear them jingling.

The shape on the throne doesn’t move, just watches Hank come. The watcher looks like Jack Frost gone bad, a Black Bart-like anti-Santa in black and icy silver Western attire. Around the crown of the black Stetson he wears is a second crown of ice, and the cavern around his throne is filled with nasty-looking four-legged ICE GOBLINS that growl and glare at the visitors.

“I’m King Zero,” says the figure lounging on the throne. “Absolute Zero… but you just call me Zero.” He chuckles. “I’m from as far away West as you can get… right out past the Sun, where there’s nothing but night. I’m what’s darker than night, and colder than any winter in the world. And as for what I’m doing here, why, I came to see you, Hank!”

“Me?”

“Of course. Who hasn’t heard of Snowman Hank and his famous enchanted guitar, and the magic mountain they guard? I thought I’d mosey out this way and see the man, or shall I say snowman, for myself…see if he’s all he’s cracked up to be. And now that I’ve seen your neighborhood… I think I like it here. Might just settle down… forever.”

The children and all the critters shiver with dread, and Hank plainly isn’t pleased by the prospect. “Wouldn’t have thought you’d mind, Hank,” says Zero. “You’re a snowman. Summer’s your enemy. While I’m here you can go anywhere you like, any time of year, instead of having to stay all alone up above the snowline like a prisoner.”

The “not being alone” reference plainly hits Hank where it hurts. But he shakes his head. “Some kinds of alone ain’t so bad,” Hank says. “And you moving in here would mean there’d be nothing alive on the mountain soon, or for miles around. Even the trees would die. Can’t have that.”

“Don’t rightly know that you can get rid of me, though,” says Zero. “Don’t think you have the power. And now that I’ve got you here, here you’ll stay, you and your friends.”

He gestures, and the snarling ice goblins move in from all sides, cutting off any retreat and surrounding the visitors. Zero laughs an evil laugh as the children cling to each other in terror and the animals shiver in fear. “We’ll have a long long while to get acquainted. Forevermore…”

ACT FOUR:

Everyone is (understandably) thoroughly freaked out by the idea of being prisoners of the evil Zero inside the icy mountain for the rest of their lives (if not longer). But Hank is holding his nerve. “If it’s me and Chanteuse you came to see,” Hank says, “then I don’t know if it’s smart to antagonize us.” Zero turns a cruel, cold look on him. “But on the other hand,” Hank says, “if we’re so all-fired famous, then maybe you’d like to find out why.”

“I’ll play and sing my best for you,” Hank says. “But there’s a price to pay.”

“And what might that be?”

“You let the children and my friends go free.”

Zero considers this with nasty pleasure for a moment. “They’re not important,” he says. “Done.”

“And one more thing,” says Hank. “If you’re not afraid to have a little gamble.”

“Afraid??”

Hank ignores the threat in the word. “I bet when I sing for you, I can make you cry.”

“If I do?”

“Then you’ll take yourself right off my mountain and never come back.”

“And if I don’t, and you lose?”

Hank shivers. “Then you can stay. And when the others go, I stay too.”

All the critters and the children shout “No!” “You can’t do it, Hank!” “We need you!”

But he’s not listening. And neither is Zero. “To have Snowman Hank as my personal entertainment for all of time…” A long pause, and another of those awful smiles. “Done again. Sing your song.”

Hank lifts up Chanteuse and strikes a chord, and SINGS. And sure enough, at the end of [AN IMPOSSIBLY TENDER SONG ABOUT LOSS AND LONGING THAT WOULD MAKE EVEN A BROADCAST STANDARDS AND PRACTICES SUIT CRY], one lone tear steals down Zero’s cheek (and freezes there).

Zero is obviously furious at losing the bet, but for the moment he holds still. “And now,” Hank says, “if you’ll excuse us, we have to go — ”

“But it’s too late for you already,” Zero says, and smiles another of those wicked smiles. “Don’t you understand? It’s almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and your time’s up. Not all the tasks are done. The river… the blocked road… finding the lost… and facing me down at the heart of Blizzard Mountain… those four things you’ve done. Soon, when you take the children home as you promised, before it’s Christmas, you’ll lose what you found, and that’s the fifth task. But you still won’t have brought the trees down to Summertown. That’s task number six, the one you’ve always done easily every year until now. Not tonight, though. You’ve only got time to do one or the other before midnight. And if the trees don’t walk before Christmas Day… I can come back.”

Everyone gasps. Even Hank quails at this awful news. But after a moment he straightens up and looks at the guitar in his hands –

And throws Chanteuse to Josh, Lucius and Paula. “Take her and run for it!” he cries, snatches up Bob and Babs, one under each arm, and flees.

“Take me with you!” Boomslang Bill cries. Paula grabs him, and the whole crowd runs back the way they came through a cavern now trembling with Zero’s rage. Stalagmites totter and stalagmites rain down from the cavern ceiling, and there are near-misses and close calls, but with help from Boomslang Bart, who knows the way better than any of them, they manage to break out into the open.

Down at the mountain’s foot, the bells of Summertown strike quarter to twelve on Christmas Eve. Hank doesn’t give the rest of the group a moment’s thought: he bellyflops down in the snow. “Get on my back!” he shouts to Bob and Babs, and the moment they do, he throws himself over the nearby cliffside and starts the wildest toboggan ride down the mountain that anyone could imagine.

It’s a scary ride but also a wonderful one – for what could be better than tobogganing down a mountain in the moonlight on the back of a snowman who knows the way? Bob and Babs hang on for dear life, laughing all the way –

Until they come to the bottom of the mountain, and Summertown. In the distance, Hank can hear voices calling the kids’ names: and he sees lights moving around as their parents search for them. At the bottom of the mountain the kids jump off and run to their folks, and Hank stands and watches this, happy even though he’s also deeply troubled.

As he turns to look back up Blizzard Mountain, he spots Terry the tortoise coming slowly toward him. “Nice work, Hank!” Terry calls. “I knew you’d get it all handled. The road unblocked – the river unfrozen – the one who got it that way sorted out — those lost kids found and brought back to their folks – “

“But it doesn’t matter, Terry! Christmas in Summertown is ruined. There aren’t any trees to gather around and sing carols on Christmas Eve. No trees for the presents to be under first thing in the morning. I never did the last task. I failed!”

Terry tsks at him and leads him back down around the last curve in the mountain road. “Hank my boy… does this look like failure to you?”

Hank turns and stares… for hundreds of trees are making their way down the mountain, and the children and adults of Summertown are rushing out to greet them. The Walking Tree Roundup is under way without him! Leading the way are Lucius (carrying Chanteuse on his back) and Paula and Josh (helping steady the guitar on either side), while the guitar triumphantly plays the Walking Tree Roundup song by herself! Scrambling along after them are a horde of Josh’s snowshoe rabbit relatives, helping act as informal traffic cops to guide the trees to the families waiting for them. Everyone sings and dances around the trees as they walk to where they’re needed, settling themselves down in front of people’s houses to be decorated out in the open.

A crowd of Summertown’s kids, led by Bob and Babs, rush to Hank and dance around him, too, singing, “To the people far and near, Snowman Hank brought holiday cheer!”

Hank is dumbfounded. “But I didn’t do it – “

“Of course you did, you big snow-brained galoot,” Terry says. “Maybe not directly. But you helped them make it happen!” He laughs. “Who said you had to do all the tasks? You gotta learn to delegate, son.”

“I guess I do!” Hank laughs, as Josh and Lucius and all the others run over to him with Chanteuse. “How’d you get down to the Corral so fast? And then down here?”

“Same way you did,” Lucius says.

“You rode my guitar down Blizzard Mountain?”

Hank grabs Chanteuse from them: she twangs happily as Hank gets his mittens on her and spins her around to make sure that she’s okay. Boomslang Bill promptly falls out of her, headfirst into the snow. “I helped steer!” Bill shouts, somewhat muffled by the snow and his hat.

Terry chuckles. “Anyway, Hank, you should know that Christmas always comes if you make room for it! You made the room… by being willing to set aside what made you happy for what someone else needed more. And it’s more than that…”

“You’re right.” And Hank breaks into the first verse of the song that lies at the core of the story, while his friends gather around and join in the singing.

“It’s not the turkey and the stuffing,
“Or the gifts around the tree:
“It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling
“That begins with you and me!
“Put away those petty problems
“And embrace your fellow man;
“Then join the celebration
“All across this wonderful land!

We now start the second verse (somebody else can write this, I’m sure) which will continue over the end titles. But first the camera pans back up to the top of Blizzard Mountain, where Zero is standing outside the cavern entrance, looking down at the light and happy activity. For a moment he frowns. Then as a shred of the song floats up to him, his face relaxes, and he rubs one black-gauntleted finger over the spot where that tear froze, and sniffs once or twice… and smiles. “Oh well,” he says under his breath to his minions, “They say Greenland is nice this time of year.”

And he vanishes, leaving us to watch the celebrations down at the foot of the mountain as the adults and children of Summertown, some strangely assorted animals, and a singing snowman, all join together to welcome Christmas….

So here’s where we talk a little about the process of planning and writing the outline for The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, from the point of view of someone who’s done a fair amount of animation work.

Why did I do it? Partly for the challenge. Even well-established writers ought to be stretching themselves every chance they get: part of the job, as I conceive it, is to try not only things that others have never tried before, but things that you’ve never tried. The more I thought about Snowman Hank and his six tasks, the more this piece of potential storytelling struck me as being like a writer’s version of the very ancient game show “Name That Tune”. “I can name that tune in… three notes!” “I can make an outline for a Christmas special out of… a minute and a half of video and six or seven lines of dialogue!”

Some challenges are just too good to pass up on. But once the challenge is accepted, the real work begins. Having decided to do something like this, it must be done as well as if there was real-world money and a real-world production team involved. What’s the point otherwise?

So. When you’re about to start playing in someone else’s universe — a subject on which I’m fairly expert — the first thing you do is take some time to carefully examine the canonical material so that you don’t get carried away, or plunge off in the wrong direction, with whatever you’re developing. This particular piece of work illustrates the need for such care more clearly than a lot of pieces of work I’ve been involved with, specifically because there’s so little to work with.

…Or at least it seems like that at first glance. When you play back the YouTube of A Very Possible Christmas, there’s no getting around the fact that there is barely a minute and a half of material that actually shows Snowman Hank. The rest of the material dealing with Hank and his canceled special comes up in dialogue: mostly from Ron, though a little from Dr. Drakken. Nonetheless, if you’re trying to back-engineer the story itself, you’re given a fair amount of useful material to work with.

Just glance at the initial scene where Ron is watching the Snowman Hank promo. You discover the following:

(a) The overall “western” feel of the milieu. Hank has a corral. (Though there’s no sign of any horses or cattle, so this is an issue that’s going to have to be dealt with. Yes, there are horseshoes on the trees around the corral… which aren’t likely to be real horseshoes: you try decorating a Christmas tree with one-pound lumps of metal and see what happens.)

(b) The extra characters who appear in the promo are all western. A tortoise, a snowshoe hare (in fact a number of them, later on): a coyote (too small for a wolf, and also seen hugging the snowshoe hare as they “embrace their fellow man”, coyotes and hares/jackrabbits often appear together in western lore): a prairie dog, and a rattlesnake in a Stetson. (It doesn’t get much more Western than that.)

(c) The fact that Snowman Hank’s “special” has been around for twenty years. This by itself raises a couple of questions: (a) is it a Christmas episode of a series, or is it a stand-alone special like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or Frosty the Snowman, both of which it pretty obviously recalls?

…And there’s something else that comes up while we’re examining this footage. If you look at the jolly sun that’s seen hanging around in both the initial sequence and the “fantasy” closing sequence of the episode, you’ll see that it is literally hanging from a wire. Just what gives with this?

Your first impression might understandably be that Snowman Hank’s special, possibly like the show from which it was descended, was originally live-action, and shot on a small TV soundstage rather than being stop-motion or animation in its original incarnation. It would therefore have been like some of the live children’s TV shows of the ’50s and 60s such as the Soupy Sales Show or even Howdy Doody.You could even make a case that the Snowman Hank Show started as live-action, was canceled, and then was resurrected in an animated form (re-animated?) later on.

Given the presence of the wire together with the fact that Ron lets us off the hook by referring unambiguously to “my favorite cartoon snowman”, let’s for the time being assume that this was what happened, and move on. (Who knows, maybe the KP producers originally thought of the Snowman Hank series as live action and then changed their minds, and somebody forgot to tell the storyboard artist to get that wire off the sun, and the thing got past in storyboard-checking because everybody was busy with something else. God knows this kind of hiccup happened sometimes on Dinosaucers, when half the time there were storyboards stacked up on your desk ten episodes high like a heap of phone books, and you weren’t always sure whether you were supposed to check episode 31 or whether your co-story editor had done it already.)

Anyway, for the time being let’s pretend that this is an animated show from the start. And whether or not there was a series first, when you’re doing a special you’re still going to have to introduce all the characters to a new and larger audience. On the other hand, if this is an original special, written from scratch, you can tell Hank’s six tasks as an origin story. In fact, you could even do that if it was a series: see above. So that’s the way I chose to do it. (Especially since none of us know who these characters are anyway, and all of them need explaining.)

Ron helps us out again by succinctly telling us what the show’s about, when Kim offers him his Hanukkah present to try to make him feel better after the news that this year’s airing has been canceled in favor of “XXTreme Xmas”. Ron’s response:

RON STOPPABLE

Is it a cartoon snowman who teaches kids the power of family, friends, and turning the bad guys good?

(This also being a theme that underpins a fair number of episodes of Kim Possible; but that fact should surprise no one.) …The narrator of the trailer also helps us by describing the story as “heartwarming”, which in its way tells you something about what the action, and character interactions, are going to be like. This is not going to be a gigantic special-effects fest that ranges across the globe, but something relatively intimate and character-driven. The invocation of friends and family tells us that these institutions are going to be threatened and then saved, in the persons of some of the characters, during the course of the story.

And another limiting factor is going to affect the story that can be told here. How long should we assume the Snowman Hank Special to have been? Most animated Christmas specials have run only half an hour. If “now” for KP is assumed to be around 2000, then “twenty years ago” was 1980, and full animation was still expensive and time-consuming to produce. No one was going to take a flyer on a one-hour special unless the original material was a runaway hit. However, there have been exceptions: and also, if Snowman Hank was a series previously, it has some status as a pre-sold property. So what I’ve outlined here is a one-hour special, broken into four acts as was more normal in the 80’s before the structure (and permitted number) of commercial breaks changed. The object thus becomes creating a story that will comfortably fill that space without feeling either too stretched (sometimes a problem when adapting a literary property, for example: only the genius of Chuck Jones could make the brief Grinch story fit perfectly into half an hour) or too hectic and rushed to be properly heartwarming.

So having settled all that, now we come to the story itself and the titular Tasks. Ron implies that there is a Bad Guy to be defeated — or, more difficult, turned — so the threat to friends and family has to come from, or via, the Bad Guy. Since we have all these ancillary characters — the animals, and usefully, those two human children — it makes some sense to use them and their attitudes and actions to point the way to the Bad Guy and the problem he/she poses.

The writer on “A Very Possible Christmas” was plainly well grounded in previous TV holiday traditions, and there are references to other Christmas specials liberally sprinkled throughout the episode. Probably my favorite is when Dr. Drakken starts gloating about Christmas being the perfect time to do dastardly things —

DR. DRAKKEN

Because it is Christmas! The one time of the year when she is off duty. Busy with her twinkle lights, and mistletoe, and carols, and roast beast, and fram-franglers, and zoob-zooblers --

Shego grabs hold of Drakken’s shoulders and shakes him.

SHEGO

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dr. D!

DR. DRAKKEN

What??

SHEGO

You’ve stopped using words.

Though of course he hasn’t: the language comes more or less straight from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And there are also a lot of other sly Christmas-cultural references scattered through the episode — Drakken’s remark about everybody having “a blue Christmas” this year, taken together with the Elvis Santa on the Possibles’ mantelpiece: a very cranky bear possibly stranded in the episode from a Coke advertising campaign: various other bits and pieces. It’s fun to try to catch them all.

In any case, after digesting as much as possible of the episode’s context, and sitting and thinking about it while suitable mood music plays (what I used, you can get from Amazon below: some of the nicest renditions of Christmas music around, easy on the ear and not overly intrusive. Beegie Adair is terrific), there still remains the biggest challenge: trying to write an outline for something that might conceivably become a much-loved special that has been shown and reshown for “more than twenty years”. Yeah, let’s just sit down and attempt to commit a classic, shall we? says the back of the writer’s brain in a skeptical tone.

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained; and though there’s no way to tell in the real world what will turn anything into a classic, all you can do is your best with whatever raw materials are presented to you. And beyond that, one accessory that a working writer quickly grows as his or her career develops is an unusually high level of certainty that if he or she really puts her/his mind to something, it can be successully pulled off. Sure, doubts creep in while you’re in the middle of a project: but you learn to override them — or at least to judge them critically to see whether they’re just nerves or genuine signals from your writer’s-brain that something needs to be fixed. Later on there can be notes. (In fact, later on, there will be notes. There’s no avoiding it. But you strive for a situation that causes you as few notes as possible.)

Anyway, there it is: the first-draft outline for The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank. It’s not at all perfect. I can already see things that need fixing, characters who need beefing up, and various structural tweaks that would need seeing to in any further stage of development. But that’s always the way it is, starting about five minutes after you turn in any first draft of anything. …Is it anything like what the KP production staff would have come up with? Almost certainly not. Though that writing team had a particular cast of mind which I really like, we’re all different writers,usually coming from very dissimilar places both physically and creatively. Give this assignment to a Paul Dini, or a Christy Marx, and you would get something entirely different. This is just my take on the concept. Maybe someone else will come up with something better. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it! It was fun to do. (And now I have another Christmas story to work on. I leave it to the Young Wizards fans reading this to consider (with an eye to Wizard’s Holiday) the possible ramifications of a story with the title “How Lovely Are Thy Branches.”)

The writing of "The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank" was last modified: February 6th, 2016 by Diane Duane

“@wilw @dduane fan project for #Kimvention2012 – What do you think the 6 Tasks of Snowman Hank were? #kimpossible #snowmanhank”

…All I can say is… it got me thinking. Too many people know that I love the Kim Possible series dearly, for a number of reasons including the relative smoothness with which the characters grow and change. And then the tweet reminded me of the Christmas episode, which is… quirky. (And which I particularly love for its meta qualities.)

So I’ve posted over here what an animation writer who was in a hurry (and possibly a few drinks gone in pre-Christmas cheer) might have turned in to a tolerant story editor at some 80’s network as the first-draft outline for “The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank.” (I more or less imagine the story editor as being Art Nadel, that prince among producers, who gave many a new animation writer his or her leg-up into the industry in the Eighties.)

(ETA: sorry for the delay in this, folks: I wound up wrestling with a cold over the last few days, and it slowed things up.)

Here’s the original Kim Possible episode, so that everyone has a referent for the peculiarities to follow.

Coming December 3-4: "The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank" was last modified: December 2nd, 2011 by Diane Duane

…Yeah, you heard that right. This is apparently a pre-alpha, meaning that everything about it may have already changed.

Nevertheless, I’m going to go off somewhere quietly now and clutch my head. DUELING PONIES. (There are even banjos in the background music.) (Disclosure:I keep a casual eye on Pony business, as I’ve worked with them in the past.)

My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic was last modified: June 27th, 2011 by Diane Duane

About twenty years ago we were living in a different house in Ireland, and we had analog satellite rather than the digital that’s pretty much all there is here now. That analog system meant we had access to a lot of the satellite stations that broadcast “in the clear” from Germany.

I was just starting to study German then, and was watching a lot of TV on the main German stations – RTL1 & 2,ARD,ZDF,ProSieben,3Sat, and the predecessor to what is now Sat.1* – to get a feel for the sound of the language. There was some fascinating programming on these, especially late at night.

I no longer remember the circumstances in which I stumbled upon the show from which the video below was extracted. All I know is that as soon as I realized what I was looking at, I slapped a tape into the VCR and started recording. The show was a history of German television advertising, and it had wonderful things on it, some of them just eyewateringly strange.

One of these was the truly bizarre (by today’s standards) commercial that follows. Our good friend Torsten Dewi, aka Wortvogel, veteran German TV writer, film critic and (former) man-about-München, tells me that it was a blanket ad sponsored by a number of participants in the German dairy industry – sort of a German variant of the famous dairy-board-based “Got Milk?” campaigns in the US, or similar campaigns for meats (a la “Pork. The other white meat”).

But take a look at this. Warning: if your cholesterol is on the high side, you may need your medication after sitting through this thing. If you’re a cardiologist, you’d better brace yourself before you watch, as some of the things the characters in this animation are going to do will turn your brain right around in your skull. …A rhyming translation of the song that runs behind the action appears after the video. Unfortunately the video doesn’t display a full set of controls for some reason. You can pause it by clicking on it, then restart by clicking again.

(Note: the beginning of the video is from another commercial, featuring a young chef saying “It has to be easily digestible — like Overstolz (cigarettes) from the Rhine!” It’s there because I wanted to keep the music from the main part of the video in one piece. If like me you feel the urge to hide your eyes on seeing a head chef strolling around a food prep area and handing his staff packs of cigarettes, then look away for about five seconds.)

The song, in rough translation, goes something like this:

These days everyone’s insides are overloaded
With chow whose food value’s so corroded
that your insides and your guts get discommoded
and your cardio and liver get clogged up!

Nonetheless folks keep on shoving food inside ‘em
Until it’s almost calcified ‘em —
Then the innards to a sorry halt come slidin’
And the gall starts heading northward in a rush!

[spoken] So what gives with that donkey-clerk?
We need to get some cows to work!

— And we cut to the cows of Germany, chewing their cuds, and then swinging milk churns and dancing to Alpine zither music. They dance into the dairy, churn the butter by kicking the churns up to tumble in the air, and then start going through the rest of the production process. The cow doing the rough shaping of the butter blocks is using a pair of grooved wooden paddles which are still used in small dairies all over Europe for working butter (the English-language term for these is “Scotch hands”). These are used for squeezing the last vestiges of buttermilk out of the butter, and also for working in salt. – Another cow then helps with the packaging.

And now comes the Butter Propaganda. As the happy cows skip into the stylized human being and start buttering his heart valves and smearing his gall bladder with the stuff, the song resumes:

Kids, here’s what you have to know:
Back to nature you should go!
Butter’s the best cure, you know,
And this is why that’s true:

Butter cleans your stomach out,
Gives you energy without a doubt,
Helps the heart pump in and out,
‘Cause butter’s good for you!

(chorus)

Now, people, with butter
Things “go smooth as butter”,
The good stuff’s all in butter today:
But be careful, folks, ‘cause
The brand name’s important:
It’s German brand-name butter that’s okay!

No more kidney stones for you,
Upset nerves get quiet, too:
Butter ‘em up, they’ll calm right down –
That’s what you should do;

Butter sorts the liver out,
Makes the gall bladder grin and shout,
Good health is what it’s all about
With butter from the “coo”!

About the above rendering of the song: Torsten kindly gave me a literal prose translation, which I’ve adapted. Sometimes I’ve let the exact sense of the words go for the sake of a general effect, especially where the German can’t be even closely rendered into English in rhyme — the funktioniert / geschmiert / guarantiert combo after the first chorus is a super internal rhyme, but really problematic when you try to translate it closely.

…There’s something to add to this in passing. More than one European dairy culture has the tradition that butter is somehow magical. Possibly this comes of ancient people’s confusion and/or admiration about the way something that started out cream suddenly becomes butter and buttermilk – similar to the sudden, seemingly magical changes that happen to dough or grape juice when yeast is added. Also, butter is sometimes unpredictable, as bread and wine are – conditions have to be right for its making, or it can fail – so it gives the impression of being a living thing, something that has to be placated and coaxed (as in all those traditional buttermaking songs).

In these traditions, butter is often assumed to have mysterious powers in its own right. Butter neglected, disrespected or treated carelessly is susceptible to being stolen by witches or bringing down a curse on those who misuse it. However, butter churned on certain feast days or nights, especially in May, can protect humans and livestock from sickness and the evil eye, and cure all illnesses. The Irish saying “An rud nach leigheasann im ná uisce beatha níl aon leigheas air / What butter and whiskey won’t cure, there is no cure for…” has parallels in Switzerland and Austria, and the phrase “Butter is the best cure” in the song is a straightforward lift from an old German-language folk saying. So it’s fascinating to see this material turn up here in a piece of straightforward advertising film from the middle of the twentieth century…

(And now I have to go try to get that butter song out of my head, where after all this post-editing it bids fair to be stuck for hours, if not days. Oh well.)

*I think I liked their old rainbow-sphere logo better. The new one looks like a peppermint ball.

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The past, buttered up was last modified: October 24th, 2016 by Diane Duane

Paul Dini is an old friend of ours. I first met him in the ’80s while working on some development stuff at Filmation in LA: my office was just down the hall from his and Robby London’s. We shared many strange adventures there, mostly having to do with creatively rearranging the action figures in the Castle Greyskull prototype that lived in the office of the late Art Nadel, our much-missed story editor.

Anyway, as usual, in due time everyone moved on to other work. Robby went here and there and wound up at DiC: so did I, when he hired me on to storyedit Dinosaucers. And Paul eventually found himself working on Batman: The Animated Series at Warner Animation, and later on he also did some work on Justice League Unlimited. Which is where this happy moment comes in.

In a script Paul did called “This Little Piggy”, Wonder Woman winds up getting turned into a pig by the vengeful Circe (who is taking out on WW some aggro Circe feels she owes the Amazon’s mother, Queen Hippolyta). Batman — who as we all know is a bit of an item with “Diana Prince” — goes off to try to save her, in company with the sorceress Zatanna (who is a bit of an item for Paul Dini, to the point of his having married someone who resembles her strongly. But that’s another story). 🙂

The expected fight breaks out as Circe sics her boys-cum-beasts on Bats and Zee, and matters go rapidly downhill from there. But as usual the World’s Greatest Detective sees what needs to be done, and (having grasped one of the basic truisms of magic, that everything comes at a price) stops the fight and asks Circe to specify the price of the spell she would have to work to turn Wonder Woman back. Circe tells Batman that it would require that he give up something precious, something that once gone, can never be replaced. “Something … so… shattering,” she purrs.

And the next thing you see is Batman paying that price… but not in the coin you might expect.

When I first saw this episode I chuckled for a good while afterwards, recognizing Paul’s famous quirkiness at work (not to mention his intention to get Kevin Conroy, the actor voicing Batman, a chance to show off his terrific singing voice). So when TG4, the national Irish-language TV station, showed “This Little Piggy” one afternoon, I hit the record button to see what it looked like as a dub.

And got a delightful surprise. Because besides the prosaic business of dubbing the episode as Gaeilge, TG4 had also taken the time to translate the song “Am I Blue” into Irish, and in appropriate rhyme… and had brought in a separate Irish-speaking singer to dub it.

Take a look at this, and enjoy. The clip starts with poor Wonder Woman being flung onto the conveyor belt at the meat processing plant to be turned into bacon. (It starts a little earlier than the English-language clip: I thought people might be interested in hearing Irish being spoken as well as sung.)

"Am I Blue" as Gaeilge was last modified: September 17th, 2016 by Diane Duane

…I confess I kind of like Buttercup’s giant hammer. (But then I’ve always been more simpatico with Buttercup: our management styles are similar.) Bubbles’ giant bubble-blowing thing is predictable: not sure what to make of Blossom’s magic yoyo.

[tags]Powerpuff Girls, Powerpuff Girls Z, Anime[/tags]

More information I wasn't expecting was last modified: July 15th, 2006 by Diane Duane

A note to the Scooby madness: in having a casual look at one of the Scooby episode guides, I find that I’ve written two episodes that I don’t even remember. Egad.

The interesting thing is that the original scripts seem to have been misplaced somewhere along the line; otherwise the titles would have been in my CV a long time ago. (After six house-moves in sixteen years, this probably shouldn’t be a surprise, even though not one of the moves would even register on the NESFA “move scale”.) Oh well….

Scooby-Doo and me: relationship amnesia was last modified: July 31st, 2002 by Diane

The ScoobyThon on Cartoon Network continues, much to Peter’s helpless dismay. I left a videotape recording on super-slow last night and actually managed to catch my very first piece of TV work, a deathless thing which revels in the title “The Hairy Scare of the Devil-Bear.” It features two characters named after Larry and Fuzzy Niven, this being its only possibly claim to any kind of fame whatsoever.

I wish they would just “strip” the things in temporal order so that I could get all my taping done at once, but there’s no way they’re going to do that: even middle-of-the-night viewers would be bored witless. Oh well. It’s been educational watching excerpts from The Many Lives of Scooby and noting highs (Shaggy unpacks a suitcase and mutters, “I guess I’d better dress for dinner.” — at which point we see the suitcase is full of identical green floppy T-shirts…) and lows (right now the group is having a run in with, not just a ghost, but a ghost spaceman. Argh).

The only thing about this exercise that’s really beginning to get under my skin would be the incessant (five per hour, at least) commercials for a relentlessly insipid MOR collection of Christian music called “Songs 4 Worship”. “Millions have Experienced the Glory!” the announcer intones. Well, if they have, it’s been despite the music, not because of it. I’m going to have to listen to the B Minor Mass about thirty times to get the sound of some of these things out of my head. The heck with you, Time Life Warner AOL Whatever! (Yeah, I know, I work for Warner sometimes. Sometimes the King’s Shilling looks more tarnished than others.) (But I’ll take the heck-wish back the minute that the story editor on Justice League calls me and asks me to write a Green Lantern script. Yeah, that’s the ticket.)

ScoobyThons and other local distractions was last modified: July 30th, 2002 by Diane

This is plainly one of those weeks when my past is going to come back to haunt me with unusual insistence.

Starting this morning, Cartoon Network Europe has programmed an entire week of Scooby-Doo, during which they claim they’ll be showing every single Scooby episode ever shown. Meaning my episodes as well… I’ve been wanting to get these on video for a long time: this looks like my chance. Not that I ever want to show these to anybody, mind you. I’ve just been trying to collect all my TV work for a while now, and the Scooby episodes have been the big hole in the collection.

Peter’s feeling is possibly that this is a lacuna that should stay lacunic, or laconic, or something. Well, too bad. He can watch the History Channel next week. He spends too much time watching tanks anyway.

Scooby-Doo and me (and Scrappy, of course) was last modified: July 29th, 2002 by Diane